Committee

music by Tom Deering, book and lyrics by Hadley Fraser and Josie Rourke

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 12 August 2017

Committee, or, to give it its full title, 'The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee takes Oral Evidence on Whitehall's Relationship with Kids Company', is an eighty-minute sung account of one day's evidence given to the PACA Committee, edited from the published transcript of the enquiry, directed by Adam Penford. Five MPs assisted by two clerks question Alan Yentob, played by Omar Ebrahim, the chairman of the trustees of Kids Company, and  Camila Batmanghelidjh, played by Sandra Marvin, the chief executive and founder of the charity.

The charity was set up in the 1990s to help disadvantaged and neglected children in poverty, and its CEO was a dominant and charismatic personality who was able for many years to garner sufficient funding for its somewhat controversial methodologies. However by 2015 serious concerns were surfacing about its financial viability and probity, especially as it was in receipt of several million pounds' worth of government funding, which was still being given despite official warnings that it was inappropriate to do so. Eventually the Chief Executive was dismissed, but this gesture was too late to save the charity, and at very short notice it was closed, its staff suddenly unemployed, and many young people and their families who had become dependent on it left unsupported.

Saint Joan

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 15 February 2017

Josie Rourke directs Gemma Arterton as Joan, Fisayo Akinade as the Dauphin, Richard Cant as Poulegny and de Stogumber, Hadley Fraser as Dunois, Jo Stone-Fewings as Warwick, Niall Buggy as the Archbishop, Rory Keenan as the Inquisitor and Elliot Levey as Cauchon in a production designed by Robert Jones.

Shaw's play, written in 1923, not long after Joan was canonised in 1920, uses material gleaned from historical sources close to the events of Joan's life and trials to present a strong-willed and forceful woman undone by the political realities of her time - a picture also of his general vision of the individual struggling to assert the best of humanity against often overwhelming odds.

Coriolanus

by William Shakespeare

filmed live performance from the Donmar Warehouse seen on 24 September 2015

This production from the Donmar's 2014 season was directed by Josie Rourke and designed by Lucy Osborne. It starred Tom Hiddleston as Coriolanus, Deborah Findlay as Volumnia, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen as Virgilia, Mark Gatiss as Menenius, Hadley Fraser as Aufidius. Elliot Levey as the tribune Brutus and Helen Schlesinger as the (feminised) tribune Sicinia.

The Donamr stage was stripped back to its bare back wall, painted red to chest height with various graffiti painted or projected onto it to emphasise the political background to much of the action. A single ladder stretched upwards, used in the siege of Corioli; chairs were brought from the back when needed, or otherwise left unobtrusively for actors to sit on when they were not needed for certain scenes. The outline of a rectangle was painted in red by Coriolanus's son at the beginning, and was used to indicate the confines of a house when required; later a small black square was painted within it, used to constrain Coriolanus himself when he is put on trial for treason. All in all, the atmosphere was oppressive and threatening, an apt background for both the political demagoguery and the military struggles depicted in the play.

Tom Hiddleston gave us a strong self-assured Coriolanus whose fatal aristocratic arrogance emanates precisely from his upbringing and his own personal success as a military leader. What seems straightforward to a military man - plain speech, impatience with uncongenial tradition and undisciplined civilians - is soon shown to be disastrous political ineptitude. Anger and rage cause him to turn on Rome and it is only at the last moment, when he capitulates to his mother's entreaties, that he seems truly aware of the trap into which he has fallen. The charismatic leadership, the mood swings, the fraught mother/son relationship, were all brilliantly portrayed, with powerful verse speaking and a great stage presence.

Surrounding him were an excellent cast - the tribunes baiting him with self-satisfied smirks, the soldiers enthusiastic and the plebeians wanting to be so, but frustrated when Coriolanus fails to play to their expectations, his wife and friends distraught by the turn of events, and his mother implacable at first in her almost cloying support, and at last in her crucial appeal to dissuade him from revenge. Deborah Findlay showed us in Volumnia where Coriolanus learnt his sense of superiority and entitlement, and also where he met his match in stubbornness; their confrontations were always fascinating to watch.